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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

A service that exists to enable piracy is banning piracy? Good luck :P

This is like when OnlyFans tried to ban porn. Just close up shop then.

I mean let's be honest. Piracy is the raison d'etre for Plex just like porn is for OnlyFans.

eh, I am not using it for piracy; I just like the convenience of streaming services. So my plex library is all blurays, DVDs and a handful of VHS’s that have been digitally encoded.

However, availability of bluray for new titles seems to be waning. so I can imagine many who use plex like I do will turn to piracy soon.

I’m weird though and prefer to own my stuff, I hate renting and especially I hate services which rent an entire library at once and lock it out completely without me paying arbitrarily. Feels like they are landlords of media, instead of constructors.

If we’re being pedantic though - in the US, streaming blu-rays and DVDs is also violating the DMCA, because presumably there was a step involved by the operator to bypass the encryption on the disk.

Other than family home videos, it’s pretty hard to find a 100% “legal” source of content for Plex.

> I mean let's be honest. Piracy is the raison d'etre for Plex just like porn is for OnlyFans.

Strange, I have been using it for years to stream my own movie collection (ripped by me from my own DVDs) to my chromecasts and phones.

I have too and I 100% agree that there is a strong non-piracy use-case for Plex. However if you browse the reddit r/Plex sub it's shocking the percent of people not only using it for piracy but also working to build their own user bases - I can't tell if they receive payment or not. I've seen many posts with people lamenting the behaviors of their end users, numerous with people asking for recommendations on request systems (where end users can request content) and even a few - I kid you not - complaining that they invited random people to use their Plex server but did not receive a response or were treated poorly when the end user (that term again) used it. All that is to say...I think many people are mis-using Plex

Technically that's still illegal in the US. Breaking DVD encryption is not legal, so ripping them is not legal.

It is more complicated than that. It is both legal AND illegal in the US:

> Under United States federal law, making a backup copy of a DVD-Video or an audio CD by a consumer is legal under fair use protection. However, this provision of United States law conflicts with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibition of so-called "circumvention measures" of copy protections.

> In the 2004 "321" case, Federal District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California, ruled that the backup copies made with software such as DVD Decrypter are legal but that distribution of the software used to make them is illegal.

Further problem though:

> In 2010, the Librarian of Congress instituted a DMCA exemption which protects circumvention of CSS protection under certain circumstances. This exemption expired in 2013.

Therefore, it seems to be a "case by case" basis type situation currently.

Thanks for the added details, I wasn't aware of the 2004 case. Its all sort of messed up, and ridiculous for someone actually trying to follow the law.

But Plex exists to share it with your friends which makes it piracy. It's their added value over something like Kodi.

> It's their added value over something like Kodi.

Strange again, I thought that value was easy setup and that it "actually works"(tm)

sharing with friends isn't actually piracy.

Where did you get that notion?

You can invite friends over to watch a movie with you, you can lend a movie too. Copyright law has fuzzy carve outs for this.

Yeah but not whole libraries. At least not here in Europe. Not sure about US. But here sharing a movie is only allowed if you watch it together at home.

You're in the minority.

I'd love to have a modern interface to my collection of legally acquired DVDs and BluRays and so on. It's pretty absurd that such a thing doesn't exist already. This isn't meaningfully "piracy" despite whatever the DMCA (and other laws our masters at the MPAA may have handed down to us) may say.

Couldn't agree more, but this is why we don't have nice things. The digitizing of DVDs we lawfully own isn't legal.

Using Hetzner cloud for production services (Frankfurt DC), so definitely not anything to do with piracy.

Look, I'm not sayin it stands for Pirate Netflix.. I'm just saying nobody has ever said it didn't stand for that.

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